Managing in the Digital Economy

Whether you’re a traditional conglomerate embracing digital transformation for the first time or a cutting edge tech startup looking to scale, managing in the digital economy lends a whole set of new managerial challenges (as well as some age old ones).

Surprising to no one, managers tend to hire, evaluate, and promote based on their own “templates for success.” Research from the Stanford VMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab has shown that employing two simple tactics can move the needle towards building more inclusive and diverse organizations.

How can your company improve working conditions for women in tech? The EQUALS Research Group provides a handful of recommendations — along with the caveat to think long and hard about what approach works best for each team in order to avoid unintended consequences.

While equality of opportunity and compensation has improved for women in the workforce, the high-paying, high-status financial services and tech industries continue to display significant gender gaps. Research at Harvard explores our bias issue and the extent that these biases prop up unsound perceptions about women as professionals.

Smooth sailing for female engineers once they claw their way into the profession? Not exactly. The overt and subtle stresses that come with being female in a male-dominated field have resulted in a high attrition rate. Here are a few strategies from the Journal of Organization Science to help build resiliency.

With a more diverse range of people interviewed and hired for entry-level tech roles, we would expect to see the same shift across management over time. But that is not yet the case. HBS Gender Initiative Director, Colleen Ammerman shows us that companies need to actively plug “leaks” by driving culture change and improving policies from the top-down.

The good, the bad, and the ugly. Professor Sunil Gupta has seen it all when big companies try to make digital transformation happen within their walls. His conclusion? The rules of strategy have changed in the digital age and large organizations need to start asking tough questions (across the board) to compete.

Companies that contribute to (and use) open source software can gain a competitive advantage—even though they may be helping their competitors in the short run. The reason? Contributing to crowdsourced “public goods” that benefit other firms or industries can enable companies to gain valuable insights and compete more effectively in the long term. Call it the “Linux effect.”

When Professor Ethan Bernstein used wearable technology to track workers around their open office, he discovered many who were trying to avoid collaboration rather than engage in it. This research throws a wrench in the much-hyped claims that open office plans increase productivity and collaboration.

It’s a declaration we’ve all heard before: “We need more collaboration! We need to break out of our silos and build integrated, cross-functional teams!” But what if — when it comes to collaboration — there can be too much of a good thing? This is the hypothesis Professor Jeff Polzer set out to test with his research on collaborative overload, that is how the amount of collaboration relates to organizational productivity. Using digital trace data to analyze organizational productivity at scale, Professor Polzer finds some answers that may surprise you.

Shelley is a professor of sociology and organizational behavior at Stanford University, the Barbara D. Finberg Director of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University, and the Director of the Stanford VMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab.